


Anonelbe

by AlterImpulse



Category: Xenogears
Genre: Ableism, Age Difference, Alcohol, Angst, Bisexuality, Citan and Yui have an open polyamorous relationship, Citan being an ableist fuck because he's a dick, Drama, F/M, Het and Slash, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, M/M, Overhearing Sex, POV First Person, Sex, She knows, and probably wasn't taught better in space nazi land lol, canon compliant except for the citan/fei slash, he isn't cheating on her, references to Fei's not realistic type of "dissociative identity disorder"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 20:37:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15251580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterImpulse/pseuds/AlterImpulse
Summary: "If only" are the most painful words.





	Anonelbe

**Author's Note:**

> Also note that this is NOT Citan cheating on Yui. In my view as an author and in the narrative of my Citan/Fei and Citan/anyone else stories, he and Yui have an open polyamorous relationship, and she knows of his romantic and sexual interest in men/his bisexuality.

For someone of my position to consider the thought of playing both sides seemed almost impossible at the time. Impossible, because why would one with such impeccable loyalty to the Emperor, someone whose only three disciplinary actions ever were for speech in a silent zone, the provision of more information than requested or desired, and a marriage to a Shevatian woman judged in the end to offer no threat to Solaris - why would I make such a choice?

On some occasions, I do wonder if the Emperor himself knew _why_. After all, he too believed in the Prophecy, which was what had made the decision all that much easier to convince him to allow. Because, he said, he would not trust anyone else to observe the Contact, to guide him.

In a lucky coincidence at the time, the village of Lahan’s old doctor had died. It would be, the Emperor and I had agreed, the perfect insertion point for a spy. After all, I had risen through Medical Corps as well as the Elements before I had been chosen to be one of the very few allowed into the Emperor’s chambers, one of the very few entrusted with almost all of the secrets of Solaris.

I had told myself, the Emperor, and Yui all at the time that it was only an assignment, even while I doubted the words themselves as they came from my mouth. I had almost known from the beginning that this assignment was simply not like the hundreds of other missions I had accomplished in Solaris, not like the ones that had turned me into an image of my role, _me_ , once a slave child, splashed on posters for the military recruitment offices as a perfect example of Solaris’s military might, the blue-suited Water element and Guardian Angel with the perfectly sharpened sword held in perfect pose…

The choice to change everything, I had told myself, and to abandon my name itself, had been for an unquestionable deep cover. It had been, I had told myself and the Emperor, a better idea to conceal myself. My new identity had been decided that day - _Citan Uzuki, doctor of general specialty, height 182 centimeters - fine, add a few centimeters - 29 years old - drop the five years I spent in space with Cain, why not - weight 68kg - drop a few kilograms, of course - black hair - definitely_ not _graying._

That I would find myself drawn to surface life in any way seemed nearly impossible. My stated goal at the beginning - to use my skills to guide him to lead us to the Promised Land, or, if he appeared to be going the direction of that soul that had split off from him many years ago, to use my other more well known skills to kill him, as the world had already had quite enough of this from Grahf. We did not need one who identified even more strongly with the Lambs and was even more destructive to lead us to further harm.

Yet… I had not expected that I would fall in _love_ with Fei, the Contact. Not that I would develop such intense emotions, emotions that did not befit myself as the absolute apex of the Special Forces of Solaris, the Angels, the Emperor’s very own personal spy. I had for Sigurd once, and then for Yui, but… one such as myself did not fall in love that easily, and even when I had, I had easily been able to put aside my emotions, my needs, my desires. To compartmentalize, to give them what they needed, but, at the same time, to keep the Emperor and Deus first in my heart, as the oath I had taken the moment Onimaru had been placed in my hands had been above all else.

It simply would not happen, I had assured the Emperor at the time, and at the time I had been so certain. So certain the Emperor chose to give me his full trust, to allow me to obtain what he himself had - his mark deep in my arm as the symbol of his trust, the procedure that would allow me to, if I so chose, to someday ascend to his own position. One week in the secret laboratory, a week of what felt like the tortures I had once put others through - a form of karma perhaps? But one from which I walked from alive, with very few ways to ever die, my abilities and senses heightened, though I had been disappointed that the one to fix my eyesight had gone so wrong, having left me still nearsighted. All of it, the power to destroy the Contact himself, if it came down to such a decision.

Except that it did happen. From the very first moment I had arrived to observe him, I felt drawn to him so intensely on a level of physical desire alone - I had never seen such a perfect man’s body since Sigurd’s, and it awakened those desires that I had so long tried to repress, the ones the Ethos said were not for a real man to have. The ones Deus would, allegedly, burn my body whole for even entertaining for the briefest moment. Yet, it was as if I already burned, but in a different way, especially with how easily our friendship had began despite everything, how he had seemed to sense something about myself that I did not even understand, even if his memories were gone.

The moment that he destroyed Lahan had to be, at the same time, the moment I knew I had lost the last speck of objectivity, the last bit of my common sense in regard to him. As a Solarian Guardian Angel, it had been my duty - the moment he had stepped out of Weltall, I should have ended his life in that moment and reported to the Emperor that the problem of a destructive Contact had been solved, and the mission had been completed.

One of my first acts of what would become my choice to walk the tightrope of double agent. My loyalties to Solaris now had a counterpart. My loyalties, my love for Fei, to protect him regardless of what he did, regardless of how destructive this _thing_ his mother had created in him was, regardless of… anything. I chose, in that moment, to stand back. I wanted to comfort him, to do something more than get out of the way and try to help the few survivors, but… I let him walk away on his own. Into the forest. A decision that I found myself regretting, so many times, one that still hurts to this day. It should have been _us_ going through that forest together.

Nonetheless, my resolve to let him go on his own - rather than killing him or following him - had been broken a few days later. I would follow him, would make good upon my promises to him, would travel by the Contact’s side as his protector and friend, regardless of circumstance. I had made the second decision to betray the Emperor, and he did not even seem to notice, having taken it as simply making up for the fact that I had somehow failed to get into Heimdal and take on Weltall at least enough to distract its pilot, which I could have easily done had I not frozen, that I had so - foolishly in the Emperor’s mind - given up my sword that would have ran through that heart in one moment.

Traveling together had done nothing to reduce my desire for him, my need for him. If anything, it made it almost agonizing, especially in those long nights when both of us lay in inn beds just inches from each other. In a way, it felt almost like it had with both Sigurd and Yui, except more intense, more complete than either, in a way, as our friendship deepened and I could tell his feelings, his desires were mutual, as we negotiated that complicated dance around them. One that made even the most intricate sword move or Gear battle seem like nothing, compared to just how far we would let it go, how we would get what we both wanted from each other, what we both _needed_ from each other.

On having seen Id manifest once more, I knew in that moment what I absolutely should have done - retrieved my sword and ended it right there. After all, this planet had nothing for treating a condition such as his, such an advanced case, and in a way, it would have been an act of mercy - as one puts down a vicious dog. Yet… I had an almost unrealistic hope, one borne of either love or adherence to the Prophecy, or possibly some of both, that he could, despite how broken he seemed and how dangerous he could be, fully awaken to be _Anonelbe_.

And that had been what had possessed me to go to the Emperor himself, and convince him of exactly that, that Fei simply needed more time to find himself, as I myself had. After all, I had made my own deadly mistake, ironically enough, the one that had gotten the Emperor’s attention to find my skills and knowledge to be worth far more than Third Class. It had taken every bit of what Jessie had always hated about me, my nature to be an obsequious ass-kisser that could, had I taken that path, become one of Solaris’s better lawyers, and a walk on the razor’s edge of betrayal, but one that had sent two letters: to a certain doctor in Kislev’s D-District Prison offering her early retirement and the care of her family from an unnamed benefactor, to the Kaiser himself with a not-so-subtle suggestion to replace her with myself or else.

It had been there, once Fei had won the championship of Gear battlers, that any pretense between us had dropped. I had been the one to extend the offer, as taboo and as gauche as that felt even with the measured words I chose, “a light nap,” that could have implied everything from simple sleep to cuddling to what had happened between us. Everything he lacked in experience, he made up for in enthusiasm, in passion, just as I had dreamed, just as I had thought, just as I had hoped from the Contact, but more than from that, from Fei. Our enhanced bodies, his from the Animus Relics embedded within him, mine from the nanomachines, recovered quickly enough for us to reach that overwhelming peak of pleasure again and again, before we had to throw on our clothes and go running about on trains to get Weltall back, save Fei’s new friend somehow.

Then he and Rico ran to stop a flying absolutely-not-a-nuclear-gravity-bomb-ship from placing itself in Kislev’s buried reactor to purge any Lamb in sight for the next five hundred years. I could not put myself and Heimdal on the line with them, though - the razor’s edge, and I, Citan Uzuki, was already too far over it to risk what would have been seen as defection.

Elly, however, did defect in that battle, and with her assistance, Fei saved Kislev - and that was the moment I could see his distrust in me begin. That I, with my more powerful Gear and better fighting skills, had pretended to be more of use trying to stage a pointless evacuation when everyone knew if the Hecht had landed on trajectory, nothing within ten thousand repsols would have been safe. Later on, he would tell me, but I knew then, from the looks, from the distance that formed between us, even as we still stole moments when we could, that he knew something was not right. Would never be right, again, as those last few hours before that battle had been.

I still carried that hope, to a point, through our journey. That somehow, I would obtain the courage that Sigurd had, that Elly had, to just _leave_. That that constructed, artificial personality he had created that I nonetheless loved so deeply because I could see it as his real truth despite it all, even if Id was more of the truth of him. That together, as Anonelbe and Guardian Angel, nothing could stand against us, nothing could break our bond. Yet for each moment that fueled that hope, that made me wish I could beg him to return to my bed and not hers, there were so many more to remind me that it was not to be. My own choices to act and not act, in the moment, those had been what had convinced him, along with her own prophecy, that of Contact and Antitype.

===

Their bedroom on the Yggdrasil sat next to my own. I cursed every moment of experience in the fine arts of espionage as I heard Fei with her, I could tell exactly what they were doing together once they no longer spoke, a slightly different act than the ones we so enjoyed, but it was not as if I could not envision everything they were doing from sound, from my own knowledge of his body.  
  
There is only so much even a man such as myself could take. In that moment, I pulled on my pants and my qipao loosely over them, and made my way to the bar. Maison seemed to understand, from how, for once, I had no desire to talk.

“A glass of aged red wine, Doc?”

“I could use something quite stronger than my usual.” With those words, I said no more, except for the slurred whisper I managed, as Sigurd carried me back to my room at daylight, once he was certain Fei and Elly were no longer making love.

_I need you, Fei... I whimpered, into my pillow as if I were lost forever. And... In a way, I am._

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old story but re-editing in a few links about real dissociation and DID. Real people who dissociate are not violent like Fei's alter Id, and Citan is very uninformed about DID in Xenogears canon. DO NOT get your information on DID from Xenogears or from fanfics about it!
> 
> https://themighty.com/2017/10/how-to-help-dissociative-episode/
> 
> https://themighty.com/2016/10/what-dissociation-feels-like/
> 
> https://themighty.com/2016/06/self-care-tips-for-dissociation/
> 
>  
> 
> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including
> 
>   * Short comments 
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Constructive criticism unless it is about the couple/ship itself - I know what is and is not canon - or unless it is calling me as the author out for Citan's views. I do not hold those views regarding mental illness, but canonically he's not very woke regarding Fei's condition (or Ramsus's, or anyone else's - dude slept through all but the "managing people" parts of psychology) 
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

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